Tipping paper is paper applied about the filter and a portion of a cigarette body to attach the filter to the cigarette body. Typically, tipping paper, once made, is stored in bobbins. These bobbins generally comprise a bobbin core upon which the tipping paper is wound, and such bobbins are generally shipped to cigarette manufacturers for the production of cigarettes. In many cases the outer laminations of tipping paper of the bobbin are damaged during shipping and handling and must be removed before the tipping paper of the bobbin can be fed into, for example, a laser perforator machine, used to process the tipping paper.
The method previously used to remove possibly damaged outer laminations consisted of manually disposing the bobbin on a processing machine, and then manually removing any damaged outer laminations until a place in the bobbin is reached where the tipping paper is no longer damaged. The tipping paper is then cut, and the undamaged tipping paper is manually threaded in the machine for processing. After all of the tipping paper of the bobbin is processed by the machine, the bobbin core is manually removed from the machine.
This previous method of handling and delaminating bobbins of tipping paper is time-consuming and inefficient.
The present invention overcomes these problems and provides an automatic or semi-automatic system and method which no longer requires manual removal of the bobbin from a place of storage, manual mounting of the bobbin of tipping paper on a machine, manual delamination of a bobbin of tipping paper and manual removal of the bobbin core from the machine after all of the tipping paper has been removed therefrom prior to placing a new bobbin of tipping paper on the machine.